Visitors to ground zeroof the first
atomic explosion face
the small obelisk marking the exact spot of the July 16, 1945,
detonation in the
southern New Mexico desert.

GROUND ZERO of the atomic
age is marked by a modest lava stone obelisk. "Where the
World's First
Nuclear Device Was Exploded on July 16, 1945," its plaque
reads.
The absence of the word "bomb" is
appropriate. The
scientists who built Fat Man, as the bulbous object was known,
referred to it as
"the gadget." Or, "the thing."
Ground zero usually is open to the public just
two days a year,
once in spring and once in fall. This year on July 16, a caravan
of the curious
queued up for an extra look inside White Sands
Missile
Range on the 50th
anniversary of that explosive moment that forever changed war,
politics, science
and our culture's psychology.
The artificial sun that rose before dawn that
morning gave birth
to apocalyptic nightmares of "duck and cover" and the
Cuban missile
crisis. It also promised "peace through strength"
and energy
"too
cheap to meter."
The atomic bomb imposed a stern restraint on
military escalation
and yet spawned artistic outrage that gave us Dr. Strangelove,
"The China
Syndrome" and cartoon character Homer Simpson as a
hopelessly inept
nuclear-power-plant operator.
Scientists overnight became both Prometheus and
Dr.
Frankenstein, lavishly funded and warily mistrusted, unlocking
secrets we still
aren't sure we want to know.
"A person on an airplane told me I had sold
my soul to the
devil," remarked Mike Sohn, the current project manager for
computational
physics at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico.
"I don't believe
that. We have maintained the peace."
The United States ultimately spent $350 billion
building nuclear
weapons, or almost twice as much as it has spent on space
exploration in the same
period. The additional money spent on machines to deliver the
warheads and on
other arms of the Cold War -- basically, the U.S. military budget
--
was enough to
pay the cost of reconstructing every building and road in the
country: $13.5
trillion.
The nuclear standoff arguably bought time that
led to the Soviet
Union's collapse without a World War III. But our grandchildren
will still be
paying for cleaning up the resulting nuclear-waste mess.
Thus Trinity, as that first test explosion was
code-named, was,
arguably, the single most important event of the 20th century.
The plutonium fuel of the bomb, probably a
sphere about the size
of an orange, was made at Eastern Washington's secret city of Hanford, the product
of 51,000 workers laboring for 27 months. The flash at 5:29:45
a.m. released four
times the heat of the interior of the sun, created a pressure of
100 billion
atmospheres and was seen 250 miles away.
Officials told New Mexicans that an ammunition
dump had
exploded, a story accepted in that era's patriotic secrecy.
The matter-of-fact willingness of our brightest
minds to build
such a bomb remains haunting. In the pre-dawn darkness, the
assembled physicists
slathered on sunscreen in anticipation of what they were about to
unleash, then
took shelter in bunkers and trenches nearly six miles away.
The flash lit the surrounding mountains brighter
than the noon
sun. The roar broke windows at a distance of 120 miles. In a
single instant,
scientists had released energy equal to all the bombs dropped on
London by Nazi
Germany's Luftwaffe during the Blitz.
"I am become death, the shatterer of
worlds," murmured
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting a Hindu text.
Scientist Isidor Rabi, who won a betting pool on
how big the
bang would be by guessing the equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT (it
was measured at
18,600), opened a bottle of whiskey and passed it among the
assembled scientists.
Each took a swig.
"Now we are all sons of bitches," said
Trinity
director Kenneth Bainbridge as he watched the column of fire and
dust climb seven
miles in the sky.
The heat was so intense that it vaporized the
tower holding the
bomb and melted the sand underneath into a green glass dubbed
Trinitite. A mile
away, exposed surfaces were heated to 750 degrees. At 10 miles,
the heat still
felt like the open mouth of a fireplace, witnesses reported.
Despite bulldozing away the fused sand, the
radiation levels
today, half a century later, are still 10 times that of the
background radiation levels found in nature from radioactive rocks
and cosmic rays.

JOE MCKIBBEN is an
82-year-old retired Los
Alamos physicist who
made the final connections to the bomb after it was suspended in
its tower. He was
the last to leave the Trinity site before the explosion.
McKibben, who still lives in the town of Los
Alamos, spent the
final night at ground zero to ensure the gadget wasn't tampered
with. Mattresses
had been laid at the tower base as a precautionary move in case
the bomb fell, and
at 2 a.m. McKibben lay down to get some sleep. He was awakened by
a pre-dawn
lightning storm that spattered him with rain.
He closed the switches at the base of the tower,
drove 800 yards
to a relay station and threw switches there, then came back to the
tower. Because
of the storm the test was pushed back an hour, to 5:30 a.m.
Communication was
difficult because scientists were using the same radio frequency
as a nearby Voice
of America station. Finally, he made his final connections and
drove to his bunker
about two miles away. Photo floodlights were turned on inside to
allow cameras to
record the final countdown.
Then the
bomb went
off.
"I had a photo flood on, but suddenly
realized there was a
lot more light coming in the back door," he recalled.
"It was very
brilliant outside." He threw one more switch to trigger
instruments measuring
the blast, then rushed outside 13 seconds after the bomb ignited.
"I ran out
and took a look at it. It was a big ball of fire, brilliantly
colored and highly
turbulent. The color was somewhere between red and purple."
What was he thinking? "I felt we had been
successful in our
project. I knew the war would soon be over."
Four hours after the explosion, the cruiser
Indianapolis steamed
out of San Francisco Bay bearing a bomb nicknamed Little Boy. It
was headed for
the bomber base on Tinian Island in the South Pacific, where it
would be loaded on
a Boeing B-29 and dropped on
Hiroshima,
Japan, on Aug. 6. Little Boy was not quite
as powerful as Fat Man; it exploded
with a force of
about 16,000 tons of TNT.
After its delivery, the Indianapolis was
torpedoed by a Japanese
submarine and its crew was spilled into the water. More than 500
of them drowned
or were devoured by sharks.
Pieces of a copy of Trinity's Fat Man, again
fueled with Hanford
plutonium, were delivered by air to Tinian, assembled and dropped
on Nagasaki,
three days after Hiroshima. It exploded with the power of 22,000
tons of TNT.
Because of the chaos and obliteration following
the bombings and
uncertainty about attributing cancer deaths to radiation,
estimates of deaths from
the two bombs range from 115,000 to 340,000. If the latter is
correct -- and it is
closer to the historical consensus -- the two "gadgets"
killed more
Japanese than all the Americans killed in all the battles of World
War II.
They also ended a war
that had, with
conventional weapons,
already claimed at least 40 million people. In just one horrific
example, the
Japanese army is estimated to have massacred as many as 200,000
Chinese civilians
in Shanghai in 1937.

SEATTLE TIMES
photographer Alan Berner and I came to what the
Spanish explorers called the Jornado del Muerto -- literally, the
Journey of the
Dead, a reference to the harsh route from El Paso, Texas, to Santa
Fe, N.M., -- on
April Fool's Day this year. We joined the line of vehicles waiting
outside the
gate to the historic
site.
In a van ahead was Bob Swickley of Salt Lake
City, who had been
a nuclear engineer on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and
based in Bremerton.
Behind was Louise Kern, 67, of Penn Valley, Calif., who as a child
had once met
Albert Einstein, the scientist who put his name to a letter to
President Franklin
Roosevelt urging research into building a bomb.
Both visitors said they just wanted to see where
it all
began.
More than 3,000 people came out that cool
morning, their mood
neither festive nor dour, just curious. Visitors were directed to
a dirt parking
lot by military police. A grill was set up to sell hamburgers. The
National Park
Service erected an awning and sold books representing a range of
opinion about the
nuclear age. As the day warmed, cotton-ball clouds popped from a
taut blue
sky.
The site was as empty and unremarkable as it
must have seemed in
1945. It was so lonely then that the troops stationed there won an
award for the
lowest venereal-disease rate in the U.S. Army.
Desert vegetation has long since reclaimed the
blast zone.
Brochures advised of the lingering radiation, but added that it
remains below
health-hazard levels. There was no lingering sense of menace.
Families posed for snapshots at the obelisk.
Visitors looked for
tiny scraps of Trinitite the bulldozers had missed, obeying the
admonition not to
remove them.
A white-painted casing of Fat Man, the bomb
itself, sat on a
trailer near the obelisk. A cyclone fence circled both, with
photographs of the
explosion's sequence hung on the fence. Forming a shuffling line,
people examined
the photographs one by one, studying an explosion divided into
microseconds.
The Rev. Steve Caldwell and 20 people from St.
Charles'
Episcopal Church in Albuquerque gathered by the fence away from
the main crowd and
consecrated the ground. "It seemed a fitting thing to do, to
celebrate an
important place in peace and war," said Alex Zimmerman, a lay
member. And the
bomb? "I think it was necessary. I'm thankful we were the
ones who did it,
and not the other side."
That view was typical of most of the Americans
present. We
interviewed an Albuquerque physicist, a B-26 bomber instructor and
a Guadalcanal
veteran who fitted pipes with asbestos at the nuclear labs in Los
Alamos.
The pipe fitter, 72-year-old James Garrison,
sometimes chatted
with Oppenheimer, the lead physicist on the code-named Manhattan
Project. "He
was a nice guy with a good sense of humor, though he talked over
my head all the
time," Garrison recalled, struggling to breathe as he talked
because of the
asbestos damage to his lungs. "I worked at Los Alamos, but
when they told us
they had used an atom bomb on Japan, I didn't know what it
was."
The few Japanese among us were disturbed.
Takashi Otsuka, a
correspondent for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, said he
was unhappy the
Smithsonian Institution had canceled in January a controversial
exhibit on
the
devastation the bombs wreaked on his country. "And why did
you need a second
bomb against Nagasaki?" he asked. "This is a very
important question for
the Japanese people."
Two bombs dropped in August. Three more ready in
September.
Seven due by December. Two hundred in the stockpile by 1949. That
flash of light
gave birth to a new world.
In less than three years, the United States had
built an
industrial atomic-bomb complex as big as its entire automobile
industry. Said
physicist Niels Bohr to colleague Edward Teller: "I told you
it couldn't be
done without turning the whole country into a factory. You have
done just
that."
Before the Cold War ended, an estimated 70,000
nuclear warheads
had been stockpiled by the nations of the world. Atmospheric tests
had released
fallout equal to 40,000 Hiroshimas. The accumulated waste will
take hundreds of
billions of dollars and at least another half century to clean up.

FOR THOSE who grew up
after World War II, the prospect of
nuclear annihilation was an indelible part of the era. I and my
classmates
practiced kneeling by school lockers with our coats over our heads
to protect us
from flying glass, laughing at the absurdity. We watched first-aid
films in health
class showing bodies strewn in radioactive rubble. There was a
fallout shelter in
my junior-high basement, and another in the basement of The
Seattle
Times.
Armageddon was our cultural backdrop. The
baby-boomer generation
grew up reading apocalyptic novels such as "On the
Beach,"
"Failsafe," "Alas Babylon," "A Canticle
for
Leibowitz," and "Lord of the Flies." My family fled
from Tacoma to
the Washington coast during the
Cuban missile
crisis, hoping prevailing winds
would protect us from fallout.
Psychologically, the nuclear standoff was
arguably a major
contributor to the conforming discipline of the 1950s, the
rebellion of the '60s
and the malaise of the '70s. It kept an era on edge.
Atomic fission brought benefits as well. A sixth
of the world's
electricity today is generated by more than 425
commercial
reactors in 31
countries. There are 575 nuclear-powered ships and submarines.
Five million cancer
patients get radiation therapy each year. Now
the arms race is going the other direction,
with the United
States dismantling 1,000 to 2,000 warheads a year, slowly working
toward a goal of
3,500 each for the United States and Russia.
Tensions have cooled, but the weapons can be
re-targeted if
politics change. And what author Fred Kaplan called "the
wizards of
Armageddon" are not convinced the world is a safer place. In
the labs at Los
Alamos, the worry has switched from tracking Soviet missile silos
to tracking
smuggled plutonium sought by terrorists.
"There are too many reports of people
buying plutonium on
the Russian market," said
Bob Kelley, a physicist who works on emergency
response to nuclear threats. "The U.S. is the most likely
target. I think it
will happen. I really do."
"Nonproliferation has become a much more
difficult
problem," said Terry Hawkins, co-director of the federal
government's
nonproliferation international security team. At one Russian
warehouse enough
plutonium to make 20 rogue bombs has been missing since the 1950s.
In others,
Russians told him, "We secure these places with babushkas
armed with
cucumbers, and we're running out of cucumbers."
"It's not if anymore. It's when,"
Hawkins said of the
possibility of terrorists setting off a nuclear bomb. "And if
it ever happens
in this country, we may not like the United States after it
happens. There will be
a strong move to abrogate freedoms."
That prediction was made before the bombing in Oklahoma
City.

THE FIRST PLUTONIUM to
leave the Hanford nuclear reservation was
a nitrate syrup sealed in a heavy stainless-steel container and
carried in the
back seat of a sedan along the Columbia River to a train in
Portland. As shipments
increased, the Manhattan Project switched to more formal military
escort.
The bomb's development was incredibly rapid, and
no state was
more intimately involved than Washington.
Shortly before World War II began, German
physicists discovered
that atoms could be split, or fissioned, resulting
in the release of huge amounts
of energy. The news electrified physicists around the world. By
1940, researchers
in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union
and Japan were
working on the problem of sustaining a chain reaction for a
possible weapon.
Japan did not have the uranium to make a bomb,
but its
investigation of the possibility of building one did not end until
physicist
Yoshio Nishina's laboratory was firebombed by U.S. planes on April
12, 1945.
Not only did physicists almost immediately
recognize the
military potential of nuclear fission, but they also began in 1942
the theoretical
work on a hydrogen bomb based on the fusion of hydrogen into
helium, which powers
the sun and stars. The H-bomb would have the power of a thousand
Hiroshima bombs.
Because of its technical difficulty, it was 10 more years before
that new
escalation in destructive power was tested.
Since the United States had the world's biggest
economy and was
remote from the actual battlefields, only America had the ability
to sustain an
atom-bomb project during World War II. Germany never vigorously
pursued the
project, and top Nazis remained relatively ignorant of the bomb's
potential. When
physicist Werner Heisenberg held a briefing for Hitler's
leadership in 1942, a
secretary sent the wrong agenda and as a result key leaders didn't
bother to show
up.
American scientists, in contrast, convinced
political leaders of
the incredible latent nuclear power in matter. But even with
Einstein lending his
prestige by signing a letter to Roosevelt warning of the military
implications of
nuclear energy, the project languished until the Japanese attacked
Pearl
Harbor on
Dec. 7, 1941.
That it subsequently succeeded is one of the
most amazing
science and technology stories in history. Making the necessary
bomb fuel was
enormously difficult.
The most common radioactive element in nature is
uranium-238,
making up about 99 percent of the earth's supply of uranium.
Because U-238 has a
half-life of about 4.5 billion years - about as old as Earth -
only half of what
was present when Earth was formed has decayed away. That is why
the planet still
has so many uranium deposits and the United States could open 400
mines during the
Cold War and extract 60 million tons of ore for weapons alone.
Uranium-238 does not sustain a fission chain
reaction, however,
and must be modified into an isotope that can. U-238 fuel can be
bombarded in a
nuclear reactor to make U-235, the fuel for the Hiroshima bomb.
That isotope was
made and separated at labs in Oak Ridge, Tenn., during World War
II.
There was an alternative. In 1941, a University
of California
chemist named Glenn Seaborg created an element with an even bigger
potential for
explosive power. Since the previously discovered uranium had taken
its name from
Uranus and neptunium from Neptune, Seaborg named his discovery
plutonium: after
the planet Pluto and, coincidentally, the Greek god of the dead.
Not knowing which fuel could be successfully
manufactured or
fabricated into a bomb, the United States decided to pursue both.
While Oak Ridge
would make U-235, a secret complex near the remote Eastern
Washington hamlet of
Hanford would make plutonium.
Fuel rods of uranium were irradiated in Hanford
reactors to make
about a dime-sized button of plutonium for every two tons of fuel.
The elusive
substance then had to be recovered by dissolving the fuel rods in
acid and
isolating the plutonium in a complex, messy series of steps.

U.S. ARMY GEN.
Leslie Groves, who had directed construction of
the Pentagon and then became head of what had been obliquely named
the Manhattan
Project, had spent part of his early years growing up at Fort
Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington.
He looked for a site in the West remote from population centers
and with a
generous supply of electricity to run the bomb factories and water
to cool the
reactors. Hanford, downriver from the just-completed Grand Coulee
Dam and adjacent
to the Columbia River, fit the bill.
So started Washington's close connection to
atomic energy.
About 1,200 residents from the towns of Hanford,
White Bluffs
and Richland were evacuated. Construction began in late March
1943. At the peak,
51,000 workers toiled at the site, erecting 500 major buildings,
constructing the
world's biggest reactors, dumping chemical and radioactive waste
into the air,
river and soil, and for the most part remaining thoroughly
mystified. Rumors about
what they were manufacturing jokingly included fifth-term buttons
for Roosevelt.
In Santa Fe, residents joshed that the nearby Los Alamos complex
was making
windshield wipers for submarines.
President Truman revealed the truth about the
project when
Hiroshima was bombed. When Japan surrendered, a Richland newspaper
headline
proclaimed: "Peace! Our bomb clinched it!"
Both bombs were dropped by the Boeing
B-29 that had
been
developed in Seattle, at that time the most complex airplane in
the world. In
February 1943, a test version of the initially troublesome plane
had crashed into
a Seattle packinghouse, killing the crew and 19 workers.
About 2,000 of the Boeing bombers were
eventually built by a
variety of manufacturers for a cost of $3 billion, about $1
billion more than the
Manhattan Project cost. Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit,
conventional
firebombing by these planes had destroyed large parts of 66
Japanese cities,
burning 178 square miles of buildings and killing more than 1
million Japanese
civilians.
Boeing built the plane in Renton and Wichita,
Kan., while other
manufacturers erected additional bomb factories. The Enola Gay,
which bombed
Hiroshima, and Bock's Car, which bombed Nagasaki, were made by
Martin in Omaha,
Neb.
The plutonium bomb had another Washington
connection. It
depended on an "implosion" idea first put forward by Cal
Tech's Seth
Neddermeyer, who after the war taught physics at the University of
Washington.
In either a uranium or plutonium bomb, the
fissionable material
had to be suddenly squeezed together to make a big enough mass to
become
"critical" enough to sustain a chain reaction of atomic
fission and
initiate an explosion. In the uranium bomb, a modified gun inside
the bomb casing
was used to fire the uranium together.
The plutonium bomb, in contrast, depended on a
more efficient
but more complex implosion of its sphere of plutonium, driven
inward by
surrounding conventional explosives. Neddermeyer won adoption of
his idea over the
initial skepticism of other physicists, but lacked the managerial
skills to run
the team that perfected it. That was done by Harvard's George
Kistiakowsky.
Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended
World War II, but
not atomic weapons. Proposals to put their control under an
international
authority such as the United Nations quickly died, and the Soviet
Union soon stole
plans for the atomic bomb with the help of spy Klaus Fuchs. In
1949, the Soviet
Union built and exploded a copy of the original Fat Man, down to
its wiring
mistakes. The nuclear-arms race was on.
Instead of slipping into postwar oblivion,
Hanford expanded. It
eventually boasted nine of the nation's 14 nuclear-weapons
reactors and pumped out
more than half of all the plutonium the United States produced, in
the process
releasing 467 million curies of radiation into the environment and
becoming a
dumping ground for nuclear waste from around the nation.
Boeing churned out new weapons systems, from the
incredibly
successful and durable B-52 bomber to the nuclear cruise missile.
Spokane's Fairchild Air Force Base became home
to nuclear-armed
B-52 bombers on constant alert. McChord Field near Tacoma became
an integral part
of North America's air-defense network. A communications antenna
was built in the
Cascade Mountains. A National Security Agency listening-post
satellite dish was
erected at the Yakima Firing Range. Nuclear submarines were
serviced in Bremerton
and Navy surface ships unloaded and loaded nuclear warheads at
Port Townsend's
Indian Island ammunition depot on their trips in and out of Puget
Sound.
The Navy selected Bangor, on Hood Canal, as one
of two bases for
its fleet of Trident
submarines, the most powerful and invulnerable leg of the
American strategic "triad" of nuclear delivery systems.
The Trident is a culmination of a half century
of squeezing a
bigger nuclear punch into smaller and smaller packages. Each
warhead on a modern
D-5 missile packs 14 to 24 times the power of Nagasaki's Fat Man.
Each missile can
carry up to eight warheads. And each submarine carries 24
missiles.
The B-29 flying over cloudy Nagasaki missed its
intended target
point by several miles. The newest Trident missile, so far in
place just on
submarines based in Georgia, can fly 6,500 miles, navigate by the
stars and come
within 1,500 feet of its aiming point.
The resulting potential for destruction is
difficult to grasp.
To get some sense of it, recognize that a single submarine has the
ability to drop
on 24 of the 25 American cities big enough to host a major-league
baseball team
the destructive equivalent, each, of at least 175 Hiroshima-sized
bombs.